Hybrid clouds play key role in strategies across organisations

The advantages of an on-premise compute deployment are limited by in-ability to scale rapidly.

By Tarun Dua

Hybrid cloud deployment is a combination of one or more of private, public cloud, and on-premise infrastructure. It allows organisations to experiment with new cloud services and at the same time their production workloads can be run on battle-tested private and public cloud services. According to MarketsandMarkets research, by 2023, the hybrid cloud market is expected to grow to $97.64 billion from $44.60 billion in 2018.

A private cloud deployment provides compute resources that are available for a single organisation. Organisations can implement their own security and management policies. Also, it becomes easier to manage and apply data security policies to be compliant with regulatory frameworks such as HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS. Newer on-premise deployments use modern tooling that provides public cloud like on-demand compute features like use of containers apart from virtualisation which is now a standard.

The advantages of an on-premise compute deployment are limited by in-ability to scale rapidly. On-premise compute deployment usually can’t immediately get access to new hardware innovations in compute/storage/AI as rapidly as they are happening in the public cloud compute ecosystem. This is the case even if the newer features supporting newer innovations are available in the on-premise software platform, because there’s a lag between justifying the need for newer hardware and its procurement and deployment.

Organisations need to have a certain scale to be able to afford an on-premise private cloud deployment and ability to hire and train a CloudOps team. In-house CloudOps teams can rarely analyse techno-commercial advantages with ROI of newer hardware and software innovations to apply to on-premise deployments. Gartner predicts that, by 2020, less than 5% of enterprise workloads will be running in true on-premises private clouds.

A cloud infrastructure provider in India recognises this need for organisations to implement their own data retention, security policies for their private cloud setups. Organisations today help in setting up a private cloud adjacent to a public cloud with no hardware ownership or on-premise deployment that allows them to have the best of both worlds. Organisations can completely mitigate the risks related to implementation time and can retain the flexibility of pay as you go. Establishing connectivity between private and public cloud is seamless through the use of software defined networking (SDN).

By 2020, 90% of organisations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities, according to Gartner. An indicator that hybrid cloud plays a key role in the cloud strategies across organisations.